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Regardless of the company I’m working with or for, contests and giveaways are a crucial online marketing strategy in converting the drive-by visitor into a loyal reader.  They created a positive association with your brand by the offering of actual rewards for their valuable time and data.  They can be incredibly effective at growing mailing lists, and increasing product sales.  When successfully organized and tied to your brand, its a way to help customers to love you.

The challenges come with deployment.  This level of programming and logistics often warrants bringing a developer into the mix.  This is true especially for those companies early in their online marketing strategy.  And for many, this cost may be a barrier to entry.

ContestMachine, founded by CrystalRoot’s Savraj, Kalid and Lee, have streamlined the process into an intuitive widget.  You specify the prize, the level of participation and timeline.  Customize the colors to match your site, embed and you’re up and running.

For those running two or fewer contests a month, the service is free.  The more ambitious will be charged $9 a month for ten contests or $90 a year for fifty.  They are currently running a promotion which offers unlimited entries for the free and monthly packages.  Normally, they are capped at 1,000 and 10,000 respectively.

The benefits of running contests online are obvious.

• Inform consumers of new products and services
• Amassing targeted consumer information
• Positive consumer association with your brand
• Entice entrants with coupons and discounts
• Attract new customers

Lastly, contests are one of the best methods of generating the coveted online marketing goal of word-of-mouth promotion.  By encouraging the contest to take off virally –through a sharing option — advertisers can determine their audiences social makeup.  This person-to-person exchange is one of the best ways to give your contest validity in the eyes of potential customers.

Asides:

As always, here is the wordle for today’s post.

This entry was posted on Sunday, September 7th, 2008 at 3:30 pm and is filed under Blogging, Development, Marketing, Media, Web 2.0. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.